Anti-fluoride crusader tours region

EIGHT weeks ago, South Australian Independent MP Ann Bressington learned some people were worried about the use of fluoride in their drinking water.

Today she is touring the nation to help create a co-ordinated campaign by the nation’s many and disparate anti-fluoride groups in a bid to bring awareness to a substance she compares with asbestos, tobacco and DDT.

Ms Bressington arrived in Lismore yesterday and will be in the region until tomorrow, when she will leave for the Gold Coast to meet anti-fluoridation groups there.

Ms Bressington said the groups’ concerns were sound and she had been meeting with ‘health professionals’ who claimed to have been bullied and intimidated and have had their careers threatened when they tried to speak out on the issue.

She said the health professionals included a broad mix of doctors, nurses, dentists and dental nurses. But she declined to name any of them, or even say whether she had met, or was meeting, any on the Northern Rivers.

Ms Bressington also conceded her new campaign against fluoride had received a flat response in the South Australian Parliament. However, she said she was determined to push the issue.

Health authorities say decades of monitoring fluoride use in drinking water around the world has shown it is safe and has a dramatic impact on improving the health of teeth.

However, Ms Bressington said fluoride was to blame for many of the ills off contemporary society.

“I have read 23 studies on the harm done to children – prenatal and postnatal,” she said.

“There are also signs of rises in cancer, dementia, Alzheimer’s, in ADD in children and in children being born with a mental or physical disability.”

Ms Bressington also rejected suggestions that arguments from both sides of the fluoride debate were littered with self-serving claims that made it difficult to sort truth from fact.

She said she believed those campaigning against fluoride would not profit from fluoridation programs being axed. On thatbasis, she said they were working for the benefit of their communities and that they were people of integrity without an axe to grind.

Yesterday, Ms Bressington met with Al Oshlack, who has launched a court action challenging Rous Water’s decision to go through with fluoridation after councillors were told changing their mind could see them in court and could cost them their homes.

Legal case

AL OSHLACK says he expects a hearing date for his case against Rous Water to be set on November 26.

Mr Oshlack is challenging Rous Water’s decision to fluoridate the region’s drinking water. He said he had affidavits from people within the health sector and legal opinion that warnings councillors they would be personally liable if they failed to vote for fluoridation were unlawful.